"Juventude em fúria" : representações, tensões e política no governo Reagan

Abstract

In the contemporary world images play a fundamental role in the process of educability. Exposed everywhere and in different ways, increasingly, the spectators interact with the images and begin to have their educated look through them. Among the imagistic diversity that participates actively in the construction of the social identities of men and women in history, cinema has played a unique role. This dissertation entitled "Bad Boys: representations, tensions and politics in government Reagan" linked to the Postgraduate Program in Education, (PPGEdu/CUR/UFMT), line of Research Languages, Culture and Knowledge Construction: historical perspective and contemporary, has as main objective to investigate the points of dialogue, tensions and conflicts initiated by the movie Bad Boys, Hollywood production of the 1980s, as a representation of reality and policies implemented for immigration and privatization of prisons in the United States during the years of Ronald Reagan's presidency. In this historical context of expansion of neoliberalism, we give special emphasis to the analyses regarding the youths of the time represented in the film. We use as methodology the presuppositions of Douglas Kellner (2001) from the aspect of the British School of Cultural Studies, which seeks to understand the formative elements of the "media culture" and its historical contexts of production. The media culture can be understood as the place of dispute of powers that create and recreate the conditions of transmission and interpretation of messages, domination and cultural, social and political resistance. The work is organized on the following reflections: the understanding built by the media on youth while "social problem" and its critical deconstruction in favor of a sociologically constructed conception; the analysis of the historical context of the production of the film Bad Boys (1983) to establish the dialogue between the representation of the diegetic world and the political and social experiences by young immigrants in the United States at the time; the tensioning of the representations of Latin Americans as subversive peoples present in the film and the North American policy known as "war on drugs"; the analysis of the representation of the Catholic characters as a group averse to the Protestant values present in the historical context of the United States; the problematization of diegetic representations regarding correctional institutions through the analysis of the emergence of the criminal state and the privatization of public prisons. In the final considerations, we point out aspects of convergence of the recent Brazilian historical and political process with the establishment of the conservative North American political project of the 1980s. We conclude that policy proposals, economic, and social reactionary continue to be produced and transmitted through images that actively participate in the process of building the social identities of the subjects that relate to these representations. We reaffirm the need of discuss such representations and images in the field of education, with ways to promote democratic guidelines that act in the process of social construction of contemporary men and women.